


Gliders

by Gynt



Category: The Flash (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 02:18:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7134596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gynt/pseuds/Gynt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a new glider shows up in Central City, Lisa Snart isn't happy</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gliders

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the New 52 DC comics universe some time between the end of Rogues Rebellion and Flash #48.

“All right. You have my attention. The Flash skidded to a halt in front of the apparition casually dangling a man _through_ the statue outside the Flash museum. “Now let him go!”

The woman – or the _remains_ of a woman – turned towards him, and he felt bile rise in his throat. She looked like Glider, if Glider had opted to look like something from a horror film instead of a fairytale. Where Glider had elfin features, hers obscured by her skin hanging off her in tatters, and in place of white and gold ribbons, red and purple veins dripped blood which existed for a few moments before fading out of existence. Right now, a fair amount of the blood was dripping over her captive. 

“Flash. You’re late. Here, catch!” With a convulsion of her veins, the man went flying high into the air.

Creating a cushion of air to slow someone’s fall by spinning his arms really fast was old hat to Barry, but it did require a limited range of movement over several seconds of time to actually be useful. This rapidly started to become a problem, as he had to dodge the new glider’s veins grabbing for him. Fortunately, she seemed to be somewhat awkward with them, overshooting turns or getting her angles wrong.

“You’re new at this, aren’t you? What did I do to you? Because I’m pretty sure I’d remember leaving you looking like that.”

“Fishing for clues on who I am, Flash? So, what, you can attack my unconscious body?” She sent another vein at him with a vicious flick. “ _Not_ going to happen. Not all of us lie around in hospital with a giant target on our backs, you know.”

The Flash dodged the vein, then the next one. The third struck him across the back, but didn’t quite manage to grab onto him. She seemed to be focussing all of her attention on the scarlet speedster, ignoring the falling man completely. Taking a calculated risk, Barry stopped generating the air cushion, judging that the man’s speed was now slow enough that landing wouldn’t do him serious damage, narrowly dodged a few more tendrils and grabbed the falling man as he finally came within range.

The gory glider laughed as he sped the man away from her. “You think I care about him? There are lots more fish in the sea, Flash. How long do you think you can keep trying to save people before you slip up? Grow tired?”  
She wasn’t wrong, he thought, even as he started evacuating people from the area. She might not be as fast as him, but she was still very fast. She might be clumsy with her powers, but this was a city full of people. He needed a better plan than just saving people as she threatened them. He made an experimental swing at her, which passed straight through her as expected. New plan, need a new plan...

His mind raced through possibilities. He couldn’t vibrate her into solidity. Her intangibility didn’t come from phasing as his did – she was an astral projection – so there was nothing there to vibrate...Something Piper had said – Glider had rendered herself unable to generate her phantom for several days when she overexerted herself pulling Mirror Master out of the Mirror World. That particular circumstance was likely to be difficult to replicate, but hopefully this new glider had a lower limit for what counted as over-exertion.

So. What would cause her to overexert? Moving too fast?

He deposited another couple of civilians away from the glider even as his brain raced through the possibilities. He could run away from her at an initially tenable but increasing speed...but she was more likely to divert to attack people to force him to come back than just keep pushing herself to follow. Besides, she didn’t have any mass to move, so how much would it actually tire her?  
Make her lift something really heavy? Need to think of a way to make her try...

Maybe another of her powers was the way forward...

He set down his latest involuntary passengers, and swept back round to the glider. “I don’t know why you’re after me, but if you want me dead, try to kill _me_ , not innocent people!”

“Hey, now! You’ve done very well so far! Keep going like this, and you might make it another five minutes before you slip up. That’s five more minutes of life for someone, right - and a long time at our speeds. Of course” – she started to send some more veins at him – “you could just give up. That way it’s your life that’s lost, rather than someone else’s.”

Rather than dodge the veins, he vibrated himself into intangibility. The first two passed right through him, but she sent them circling back even as the third hovered around him. He felt himself being dragged back into solidity as the glider laughed at him.

“Oh, brilliant plan, Flash,” she sneered. “Fighting me at super-speed? That’s your element. You might have had a chance, at least if you’d had the sense to just dump the randoms. But this? This is _my_ domain.”

He sped himself up further, aiming for a higher frequency, and for a few moments he became intangible again before she compensated. How much was this costing her? How much was it costing _him_? But he was only affecting himself, whereas she was trying to affect another person – that had to give him an advantage, right?

He accelerated himself faster and faster, switching his frequency just fast enough that he had faded back into intangibility before she could make use of him being solid. She started to get frustrated. “Just...give...it...up...Flash!”

“Not quite as good as this as you thought?” He needed to keep her focussed on this approach – if she just gave up he was back to square one. He sped his mind up further, the better to judge exactly how to walk the line of letting her think she was on the verge of success without letting her actually succeed. 

One of her veins grabbed a lump of brick from a nearby wall, and held it through his head. If he slipped back into solidity for even a moment, he’d find out exactly what would happen to his brain if it was occupying the same space. Or, more likely, everyone else would, and he’d never find out anything again. He tried to move, and realised that her veins were holding him in place even whilst he was intangible. No choice, then – he had to keep himself phased. Was she tiring? Please let her be tiring...

When the end came, it was sudden. One moment she was straining to make him solid, a grin of anticipation on her face, the next there was a flash of red light, and then nothing. It had worked – he had a breathing space until she recovered enough to put her phantom back together. And he knew just who to use it to visit.

 

The gory glider’s dangling of the man through the statue had made the TV early on – possibly it was how the Flash had found out about it. The cameras failed utterly to keep up with the combatants once the fight had started, but by that point Lisa Snart, was in front of a city’s worth of reflections, courtesy of Sam Scudder, the Mirror Master. She was not impressed. Firstly, someone appeared to have copied her powerset to go on a killing spree. Secondly...

“No finesse,” Lisa criticised. “Trying to brute force all of him material? No. She had multiple ribbons. What she needed to do was apply different levels of inclinations of solidity to different vital organs. Now _that_ I’d have been curious to see if he could survive. Put some sudden sharp changes of her own in. See how he deals with his heart and brain being in two different states.”

“Knowing him, better than he has any right to,” Sam shrugged. “Anyway, she was clearly new at this, and it took you some time to develop that much fine control. When she’s back, she’ll have learnt a few lessons. Maybe even the right ones.”

“But not, I think, the ones about copying other people’s powerset. Can you open me a portal to the bar, then start tracking down Dr Elias? Given it was his machine’s explosion that put me in this state to begin with, he probably knows something.”

 

The television in the bar was blaring the news that “Glider” had gone on a rampage in the city centre. She eyed it with disfavour – that was going to cause problems, but her being obviously here and non-homicidal should go some way to clear things with the Flash, and he’d update the police and news that she wasn’t the problem (or at least, not the immediately pressing one).

She’d chosen the bar because it was one of the obvious places for the Flash to come looking for her, and because it massively beat holding a conversation over her unconscious body in the hospital bed. Her reliance on medical care was a major vulnerability which she didn’t need to parade in front of her (technical) arch-enemy even if he was highly unlikely to actually use it to kill her. The fact that he _could_...as could one of his friends...or some completely random stranger she’d never even noticed... acted as a deterrent to her rocking the boat too much. Not completely – life would never be wholly be without risk, and it would be dull if it was – but to the level where “murder unconscious woman in her hospital bed” would be seen as a disproportionate response by most sane people likely to take an interest.

Of course, that same attitude was going to cause a problem for the Flash dealing with her imitator, and it wasn’t exactly a precedent she wanted set. Not to mention the more tools they put the effort into developing to deal with the copycat, the more have for dealing with herself. Better if she could find some way to deal with her herself without giving away too many of her secrets.

Her mind mulled over the seeds of potential ideas as she waited for the Flash to show. She didn’t have enough information yet to come up with a solid plan, but it never hurt to have a bucket of components which could be slotted in to one.

 

The Flash whooshed into the room trailing his customary lightening.

“Hey, Red. Been making new friends?”

“Don’t suppose you’d know anything about that?”

“Well, now that you mention it, there was something about her that reminded me of something,” she grinned at him. “Something familiar about the powers...”

The Flash jumped right to the point: “And I’m betting that you’re not happy about that.” 

Her smile got a lot more vicious for a moment before vanishing entirely. “Oddly enough, no. Aspiring mass murderer isn’t really the public image I want. So, Flash. Have you found out who she is? It took you a few minutes to get here.”

He shook his head. “The police are running her likeness through their facial ID, but the state of her face is going to make getting any sort of a match tricky. She’s not an obvious hospital patient. But Glider – if we do figure out who she is, leave her to me. I just need information from you. If you don’t know who she is, where would she have gotten her powers from?”

Yeah right. Leaving this to the Flash was _not_ on her to-do list.

“I don’t know who she is. Probably worth checking recent prison releases or escapes, though. Or even people in their hospital wing. Many a good super-villain’s career’s started after getting caught the first time and deciding they needed an upgrade. Just ask my brother.”

“I’ve already got the police requesting the info from Iron Heights, but it’s going to take a bit of time to get through their bureaucracy. I was hoping you could help me shortcut that. If you can’t, though, do you know how long I’ve got until she’s up and about again?”

She shrugged. “I was out for a day or so, but I don’t know that that means much. I exerted myself pretty hard but then Piper helped wake me up. Could be hours, could be never.  
And as the evidence was literally staring him in the face... “I also wouldn’t focus on matching your attacker’s features too closely. It’s an astral projection, not a mirror image. More of a subconscious self-image – how she sees herself.”

She let him ponder the implications of that for this new glider’s mindset, and of her own form – ethereally beautiful, with delicate features, dainty white dress and glowing golden hair and ribbons, but with a hard, unearthly edge to the beauty that made it more impressive than attractive. Whatever he was thinking, though, he didn’t choose to give voice to it, instead circling back round to his previous question.

“And the source of her powers?”

“Interesting, that one. I’d thought I was a one off, but apparently not. I’ll look into it whilst you track down the woman.”

He was about to object – he wasn’t comfortable leaving part of the investigation to an unsupervised super-villain – but she sank through the floor and was away.

 

Sam had managed to track down Elias by the time she returned, who was working in his usual laboratory. “No-one bedridden in his immediate vicinity, though, and whatever he’s working on doesn’t look obviously related,” he filled her in. “If he is behind this, he’s not being utterly blatent. How do you want to play this? Watch him for a while, see if he slips up? Or do you have something else in mind?”

“Something a little more fun. If I can pull it off. I haven’t done this before, but the principle should be sound.”

 

Dr Elias was dealing with his frustration with the morning’s events by burying himself in his work when Roz floated up through the floor in front of him and his patience snapped.

“I told you not to come here. Especially in that form!” He paused to collect himself. “I’m glad that you’ve recovered, Roz. But the Flash could turn up at any moment without warning, so I need you to unplug yourself and stay at home for a few days. Get some rest.”

She stared at him for a few moments, blood dripping on the floor, then silently slid back through the floor. Odd. He’d expected more of an argument...

 

Glider let her projection revert with a sigh of relief. Holding on to an unfamiliar form in all its details was hard work requiring constant concentration lest something slip away from the appearance she was after. She hadn’t even tried to talk, which was just as well – not only was she not sure how long she could have maintained a conversation and her concentration, but she wasn’t confident in her ability to replicate how she sounded. Sam had rewound some of the reflections of the fight for her to use as a reference when changing her form, but it was easier to adjust something into the right shape and then stick with it than it was to consistently create a voice each time.

“I need more practice on that.”

“Next time just use a mirror duplicate?”Sam suggested. “I know they can’t do the going-through solid objects trick due to the lack of light inside the objects, but the replication’s a lot easier.”

“I may do, at that.” She shrugged. “If there is a next time. I wanted to try it out, but there are unlikely to be all that many situations in which being able to impersonate another glider is an issue.” Although in some ways it was a pity the Flash hadn’t run in when she was talking to Elias. Right now, though, Elias had said something else which had her attention.

“He told me to go and unplug myself. His genome recoder whose explosion gave me my powers – it took existing super-tech, and gave its powers to people. What if my powers come from a piece of tech which had been loaded into the recoder previously, and still had a pattern stored?”

“He never said anything about the wretched machine recording our tech. Which,” Sam muttered, “would be entirely consistent with all the other side-effects he neglected to mention in advance.” He sighed. “Moot point after it exploded. So, he kept the tech after the genome recoder exploded, and now he’s decided to start using it to sic someone on the Flash. But it does raise the question – who was it used on originally?”

“That is a good question. Whoever it was has apparently kept a low profile since before I got my powers. Could be dead, I suppose. I don’t think Elias would have just flat out murdered them to keep a secret, but I could be wrong, and anyway the recoder was hardly the safest bit of tech.” It was one to look into, but not her priority right now. She wanted that tech. Sure, she had the same effect innately, but Deathstorm had ripped Cold’s powers out of him. Her brother had had his Cold Gun to fall back on, and all of the other rogues knew how to make their own tech if push came to shove, but what if the same thing were to happen to her? What if curing her body came at the cost of her powers? “Let’s find that machine.”

 

Roz was teetering on the brink of victory when there was a crack and everything went black. She woke after who knows how long when the circlet was taken from her skull. Automatically pushing herself up, her twisted arm screamed in pain. She cursed her cellmate, now twenty feet under the cell in an airtight hollow she’d created just for her. Cursed the Flash, for putting her in that cell in the first place. Cursed...wait. Who had taken off the circlet? She looked round. The ruin of her face, jagged scars from the prison fight (and its aftermath), greeted her. Wincing, she realised they’d been joined by a burn at one point underneath the circlet. And behind her in the mirror...

“Flash!” She spun round, but realised there was nothing she could do to fight him. Not now. Not until she could get whatever was wrong with the circlet repaired. “What...”  
“Is this it?” He cut her off, examining the circlet and disconnecting the power cords from it. “Is this what you used in your attacks on the lives of innocent people just to – “He stopped. “This has burnt out.”

“I don’t know what you...”

She didn’t even see him move. One second she was standing there, the next her limbs wouldn’t obey her and she was falling to the floor. Something out of her vision caught her and laid her on the bed. She couldn’t move. Time passed. She lay there. _She couldn’t move_. The Flash _arrested_ people. He didn’t do this. She couldn’t move...

 

Sam was looking at her. “What did you _do_?”

“Phased some of her blood into the parts of her brain which control movement whilst she was looking at your Flash duplicate. The real one will think it was damage caused by her overexertion, when he works his way down to her. She’ll blame him.” She gave a hard shrug. “I didn’t kill her. But she shouldn’t have used my power-set to go on a murderous rampage and then broken my tech.”

Sam, bless him, looked a little sick.

**Author's Note:**

> There's some headcanon in this story regarding Glider's powers (and indeed, Mirror Master's). In the comics, Glider has an astral projection with superspeed (enough to carry out a short conversation fast enough that people don't notice her presence), low level superstrength, the ability to turn things and people intangible and to manipulate those people/things and a limited ability to make hers astral projection tangible. It's not clear exactly how her intangibility interacts with the Flash's phasing, or if she can manipulate things that are intangible for reasons that don't involve her. It's also not very clear how her phasing works when trying to make two objects share the same space, although she's phased a mirror shard into someone before now.
> 
> She's shown no overt shapechanging ability, but it's noticable that her astral projection looks slightly different from her actual body.
> 
> I don't think Sam has shown an ability to rewind the image in mirrors in the New 52, but it's a trick that another Mirror Master has pulled off in the past.


End file.
